With the paint dry it was time to build a stand for the brewing vessels and an insulated (and heated) fermentation cabinet.
The fermentation cabinet is really nothing more than a double-skin cupboard insulated with 50mm of cellulose board insulation. Inside it is heavily varnished to make and spillages easier to clean and there’s support for a shelf, a 40W greenhouse heater and a 100mm PC fan to circulate the air. The greenhouse heater is controlled by an STC-1000 temperature controller, meaning I have some control over the temperature inside the cabinet. There’s no cooling system, so there’s little I can do if the temperature inside rises above the required level, but most of the time here it will be colder than required for fermentation. I fixed the STC-1000 into the door so I can operate it from the outside and easily see the temperature.
The HLT will stand on top of the fermentation cabinet to allow a gravity feed into the mash tun placed on a stand alongside. The stand is just a wooden frame with a spare piece of kitchen worktop fixed on top.
(The migration of kit from the house into the shed has already started 🙂